The rock at the bottom was crushed
under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and
every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of
tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the
plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew
three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep.
Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric
Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.
The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand
miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern
border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side
of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to
what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of
work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the
depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths.
Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying
hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say,
half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are
various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular
sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The
outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood
and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the
chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.
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